Most global warming skeptics believe that humans have some measurable impact on global temperatures and the climate, but that natural climate forces, over longer periods, will overwhelm the human influence...in addition, skeptics believe that the human influence will not result in the hysterical catastrophic climate disasters presented by doomsday pundits...

...and finally, global warming skeptics believe, for a multitude of reasons, human errors/mistakes/failings have caused late 20th century global warming to be significantly overstated.

This article addresses this last point. What if the climate experts conducted an actual experiment that would prove whether the global warming skeptics were right or wrong about world-wide warming being overstated?

Well, NOAA has actually conducted said experiment by building their U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), which precisely, and automatically, measures temperature and weather conditions across the U.S. The USCRN effort is based on the concept that the best way to measure the impact of greenhouse gases on global temperatures is to place state-of-the-art climate stations in pristine rural areas that are little impacted by people, buildings, vehicles, equipment, asphalt and etc.

An example of one of NOAA's pristine climate measurement stations is the top image (Image #1). And the middle image depicts the location of each pristine station - there are currently 114 of them, and clearly they are well dispersed providing good U.S. coverage.

By carefully planning and maintaining these pristine stations and by using the best technology available, this large-scale experiment eliminates the following problems with the older weather measurement network:

There are no needs for bias adjustments for equipment types since all equipment is identical.

There are no need for urbanization adjustments, since all stations are rural and well sited.

There are no regular sensor errors due to air aspiration and triple redundant lab grade sensors. Any errors detected in one sensor are identified and managed by two others, ensuring quality data.

Due to the near perfect geospatial distribution of stations in the USA, there isn’t a need for gridding to get a national average temperature.

So, what has this NOAA experiment found? The bottom image (Image #3) tells that story - when compared to measurements from the old, inaccurate, non-pristine network, temperature "warming" in the U.S. is being overstated anywhere from +0.5°C on average, up to almost +4.0°C (+0.9°F to +7.2°F) in some locations during the summer months.

To clarify, this range of overstatement depends on the given new and old stations being compared. However, when the new network versus old network results are examined in total, for the recent summer heat wave in the U.S., the old stations were reporting bogus warming during July that amounted to some +2.1°F higher than the actual temperatures.

What does this mean? Within the climate science realm, the old climate/weather station system had long been considered the best and most complete measurement network in the world. But when pitted against a brand new climate measurement system that has the best qualities that science can provide, we find that the traditional U.S. methodology is significantly overstating the "global warming" phenomenon. This means that if other countries replaced their own low quality network with NOAA's greatest and latest technology, with the best location site standards applied, we would discover that world-wide temperature increases have been wildly overstated also.

Conclusions: A large-scale NOAA experiment has proven that global warming skeptics were correct: temperature warming in the U.S. has been significantly overstated in recent decades. This NOAA experiment should be expanded to other continents and countries since it is now obvious that the combined older technology and substandard weather station sites have well overstated the global warming phenomenon. Before any further dollars are spent on climate change adaptation and/or mitigation, the world needs to upgrade their global weather/climate reporting network to the USCRN standard so that policymakers have correct temperature change mesurements to base their decisions on.

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Most global warming skeptics believe that humans have some measurable impact on global temperatures and the climate, but that natural climate forces, over longer periods, will overwhelm the human influence...in addition, skeptics believe that the human influence will not result in the hysterical catastrophic climate disasters presented by doomsday pundits...

...and finally, global warming skeptics believe, for a multitude of reasons, human errors/mistakes/failings have caused late 20th century global warming to be significantly overstated.

This article addresses this last point. What if the climate experts conducted an actual experiment that would prove whether the global warming skeptics were right or wrong about world-wide warming being overstated?

Well, NOAA has actually conducted said experiment by building their U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), which precisely, and automatically, measures temperature and weather conditions across the U.S. The USCRN effort is based on the concept that the best way to measure the impact of greenhouse gases on global temperatures is to place state-of-the-art climate stations in pristine rural areas that are little impacted by people, buildings, vehicles, equipment, asphalt and etc.

An example of one of NOAA's pristine climate measurement stations is the top image (Image #1). And the middle image depicts the location of each pristine station - there are currently 114 of them, and clearly they are well dispersed providing good U.S. coverage.

By carefully planning and maintaining these pristine stations and by using the best technology available, this large-scale experiment eliminates the following problems with the older weather measurement network:

There are no needs for bias adjustments for equipment types since all equipment is identical.

There are no need for urbanization adjustments, since all stations are rural and well sited.

There are no regular sensor errors due to air aspiration and triple redundant lab grade sensors. Any errors detected in one sensor are identified and managed by two others, ensuring quality data.

Due to the near perfect geospatial distribution of stations in the USA, there isn’t a need for gridding to get a national average temperature.

So, what has this NOAA experiment found? The bottom image (Image #3) tells that story - when compared to measurements from the old, inaccurate, non-pristine network, temperature "warming" in the U.S. is being overstated anywhere from +0.5°C on average, up to almost +4.0°C (+0.9°F to +7.2°F) in some locations during the summer months.

To clarify, this range of overstatement depends on the given new and old stations being compared. However, when the new network versus old network results are examined in total, for the recent summer heat wave in the U.S., the old stations were reporting bogus warming during July that amounted to some +2.1°F higher than the actual temperatures.

What does this mean? Within the climate science realm, the old climate/weather station system had long been considered the best and most complete measurement network in the world. But when pitted against a brand new climate measurement system that has the best qualities that science can provide, we find that the traditional U.S. methodology is significantly overstating the "global warming" phenomenon. This means that if other countries replaced their own low quality network with NOAA's greatest and latest technology, with the best location site standards applied, we would discover that world-wide temperature increases have been wildly overstated also.

Conclusions: A large-scale NOAA experiment has proven that global warming skeptics were correct: temperature warming in the U.S. has been significantly overstated in recent decades. This NOAA experiment should be expanded to other continents and countries since it is now obvious that the combined older technology and substandard weather station sites have well overstated the global warming phenomenon. Before any further dollars are spent on climate change adaptation and/or mitigation, the world needs to upgrade their global weather/climate reporting network to the USCRN standard so that policymakers have correct temperature change mesurements to base their decisions on.